Millennium People

I got my tea from the bar and shuffled over to the sofa near the window “Oh yeah, I remember Messenger” Bella said, in answer to my question “the thing I really hated about it was how everyone tried to talk to you at once. I could only have one conversation at a time, so I would block all the other contacts I wasn’t talking to.”

That’s funny, I thought. Isn’t multiple and simultaneous conversation the whole purpose of using a chat program? It started a train of thought that lead me to one conclusion: the origins of my digital multitasking was Messenger. In the days when my net connection was still only 2kb/s the idea of browsing was an impossibility. In any case, I’m not sure there was anything much to browse. The net was for e-mail and chatrooms… you remember, like, before the peodos got there?

Not only can we no longer concentrate on one thing for any appreciable period of time, but we can neither concentrate on one person – by spreading our attention across multiple discussions we fail to achieve any depth of communication with any of them.